Month: March 2011

When Dwayne Whitney started his trucking business decades ago he had only one truck. Today he has eighteen and 20 employees. But that’s about to change.

“The State of California says my trucks are killing people,” says Whitney. “What do you say to that?”

In a few years, new air quality regulations approved by the California Air Resources Board will render Whitney’s entire fleet illegal.

“New CARB rules are putting me out of business,” he says.

CARB claims that diesel particulates, a type of pollution emitted from buses and trucks, contributes to 2,000 premature deaths in California each year. But UCLA epidemiologist Dr. James Enstrom says the number should be closer to zero.

In 2005 Enstrom authored an extensive study that found no relationship between diesel particulates and premature deaths. He says his study, as well as other evidence that agrees with it, have been ignored by an agency bent on passing ever more stringent regulations regardless of their effect on California’s economy.

Enstrom blew the whistle on CARB for, among other things, failing to publicize that the lead author of the study that was used to justify the new regulations falsified his education history (he purchased his PhD from an online diploma mill).

But UCLA didn’t come to Enstrom’s defense. In fact, officials informed him that, after 34 years at the university, he was out of a job.

….In the tapes, a Live Action actor calls 30 Planned Parenthood clinics in 27 different states, inquiring about mammograms at Planned Parenthood. Every Planned Parenthood, without exception, tells her she will have to go elsewhere for a mammogram, and many clinics admit that no Planned Parenthood clinics provide this breast cancer screening procedure. “We don’t provide those services whatsoever,” admits a staffer at Planned Parenthood of Arizona. Planned Parenthood’s Comprehensive Health Center clinic in Overland Park, KS explains to the caller, “We actually don’t have a, um, mammogram machine, at our clinics.”

Opponents of defunding Planned Parenthood have argued in Congress and elsewhere that the organization provides many vital health care services other than abortion, such as mammograms. Most prominently, Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards recently appeared on The Joy Behar Show to oppose the Pence Amendment to end Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer subsidies, claiming, “If this bill ever becomes law, millions of women in this country are gonna lose their healthcare access–not to abortion services–to basic family planning, you know, mammograms.”

The calls were recorded by Live Action, the youth-led pro-life group responsible for recent undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood staff, from management on down, willing to aid and abet the sex trafficking of young girls at 7 clinics in 4 different states. Live Action president Lila Rose says the new recordings further confirm Planned Parenthood’s corruption: “Planned Parenthood is first and foremost an abortion business, but Planned Parenthood and its allies will say almost anything to try and cover up that fact and preserve its taxpayer funding. It’s not surprising that an organization found concealing statutory rape and helping child sex traffickers would misrepresent its own services so brazenly, playing on women’s fears in order to protect their tax dollars.”

Former Planned Parenthood Director Abby Johnson notes that the recordings demonstrate Planned Parenthood is not a comprehensive health care provider. “For so long PP has touted that they are a provider of mammogram services. This is just one of the lies that PP uses to draw people into their clinics. PP is not able to provide quality services on their own, so they are forced to lie to the public about services they don’t provide–and mammograms are just one of those services.”

There was a post by some younger people I know on supporting PPH on FaceBook. And often happens with me [?], debate ensued shortly after a post of mine. Below I will reproduce some of the conversation found on this person’s FB. He posted a link to “Stand With Planned Parenthood” site on FaceBook. One person wrote that they see “no reason not to support.”

Yeah… support genocidal racist goals still in PPH. Yeah! Also, most of their services — like 95%/94% — are abortions… all the rest is women’s health type stuff. Better protect that 6% while supporting Nazi eugenics! (*was that a bit strong?*)

I respond:

‎“one group i see no reason not to support” —

“We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” ~ Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood

…In New York City in 2007, 87,527 abortions were performed, with 43,568–or 49.8 percent–of the aborted babies being black, according to the CDC. The number of white babies aborted in 2007 in New York City was 37,870–or 43.3 percent. 6,089, or 7 percent, were babies of other races, according to the report.

49.8 percent of abortions performed in NYC were black babies. According to the Census Bureau, there are 8,302,659 people in New York City, of whom 2,085,514–or 25 percent–are black. Thus, black babies in New York City were aborted at a rate that is twice the black share of the municipal population.

A report released in December by the New York Department of Health indicated that that black babies represented an even higher percentage among those aborted in New York City in 2009. That report said about 41 percent of pregnancies in the city ended in abortion in 2009 and 59.8 percent of those abortions were of black babies.

There’s one reason.

The host of the original site supporting Planned Parenthood wrote:

I would like to see what what quote was taken from so I can see it in its original context.

To which I post:

Tell you what ________, read an entire book by her. It is free online (Pivot of Civilizaion). See what the context tells you. She has a Nazi eugenicist from Germany — Ernst Rudin — write articles in her newsletter (Birth Control Review, or, BCR). In case you don’t know who Ernst Rudin is:

Ernst Rudin was director of the foremost German eugenics research institute (Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy, in Munich, Germany). “On June 2, 1933, [German] Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick announced the formation of an Expert Committee on Questions of Population and Racial Policy …. to plan the course of Nazi racial policy. The committee brought together the elite of Nazi racial theory: Alfred Ploetz, ….. Ernst Rudin, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy in Munich;….” (4) On July 14, 1933 this committee’s recommendations were made law, the sterilization law (“Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring”); the start date for exercising the law was 1 Jan 1934. What was Ernst Rudin’s opinion of Adolf Hitler and eugenics (‘racial hygiene’)?:

Academic William H. Tucker (The Science and Politics of Racial Research, 1994, University of Illinois Press) tells us about Ernst Rudin (p. 121):

In an address to the German Society for Rassenhygiene [Race-hygiene] Ernst Rudin, a professor of psychiatry who was one of the organization’s original members and now its head, recalled the early, fruitless days when the racial hygienists had labored in vain to alert the public to special value of the Nordic race as “culture creators” and the danger of “unnatural” attempts to preserve the health of heredity defectives. Now Rassenhygiene [Race-hygiene] was finally receiving the attention it deserved, and Rudin virtually slavered over the man whose efforts produced this change: “The significance of Rassenhygiene did not become evident to all aware Germans until the political activity of Adolf Hitler and only through his work has our 30 year long dream of translating Rassen- hygiene into action finally become a reality.” Terming it a “duty of honor” (Ehrenpflicht) for the society to aid in implementing Hitler’s program, Rudin proclaimed, “We can hardly express our efforts more plainly or appropriately than in the words of the Fuhrer: ‘Whoever is not physically or mentally fit must not pass on his defects to his children. The state must take care that only the fit produce children. Conversely, it must be regarded as reprehensible to withhold healthy children from the state.’ (E. Rudin, “Aufgaben and Ziele der Deutschen Gesellschaft fur Rassenhygiene,” Archiv Fur Rassen- und Gesellschafts- biologie 28 (1934): 228-29)

Who is author William H. Tucker? He is an associate professor of psychology at Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey. Tucker is apparently somewhat left of center politically, since he complains about the ‘Reagan slash and burn spending cuts.’

How many Germans were ‘force sterilized’? Most estimates are in the range of 250,000-500,000. The Germans started twenty-seven years later that the U.S. but within a few years they greatly outpaced them.

Did Ernst Rudin advocate sterilization of Americans?

Three months before the German ‘sterilization law’ was passed, Rudin’s “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need” article was published in the journal (BCR) Margaret Sanger started and continued to influence until its demise in 1940.

“Our living-room,” she wrote in her autobiography, “became a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, Socialists and I.W.W.’s [Industrial Workers of the World, a socialist organization] could meet.”42 A member of… the Women’s Committee of the New York Socialist Party, she participated in all the usual protests and demonstrations….

A disciple of the anarchist Emma Goldman—another eugenicist—Sanger became the nation’s first “birth control martyr” when she was arrested for handing out condoms in 1917. In order to escape a subsequent arrest for violating obscenity laws, she went to England, where she fell under the thrall of Havelock Ellis, a sex theorist and ardent advocate of forced sterilization. She also had an affair with H. G. Wells, the self-avowed champion of “liberal fascism.”….

Her marriage fell apart early, and one of her children—whom she admitted to neglecting—died of pneumonia at age four. Indeed, she always acknowledged that she wasn’t right for family life, admitting she was not a “fit person for love or home or children or anything which needs attention or consideration.”

Liberal Fascism – p 272-273

She sought to ban fit. “More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control,” she frankly wrote in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization. (The book featured an introduction by Wells, in which he proclaimed, “We want fewer and better children … and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us.” Two civilizations were at war: that of progress and that which sought a world “swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny.”)

A fair-minded person cannot read Sanger’s books, articles, and pamphlets today without finding similarities not only to Nazi eugenics but to the dark dystopias of the feminist imagination found in such allegories as Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.” As editor of the Birth Control Review, Sanger regularly published the sort of hard racism we normally associate with Goebbels or Himmler. Indeed, after she resigned as editor, the Birth Control Review ran articles by people who worked for Goebbels and Himmler. For example, when the Nazi eugenics program was first getting wide attention, the Birth Control Review was quick to cast the Nazis in a positive light, giving over its pages for an article titled “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need,” by Ernst Rijdin, Hitler’s director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. In 1926 Sanger proudly gave a speech to a KKK rally in Silver Lake, New Jersey.

One of Sanger’s closest friends and influential colleagues was the white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. In the book he offered his solution for the threat posed by the darker races: “Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria, by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat.1 “46 When the book came out, Sanger was sufficiently impressed to invite him to join the board of directors of the American Birth Control League.

Sanger’s genius was to advance Ross’s campaign for social control by hitching the racist-eugenic campaign to sexual pleasure and female liberation. In her “Code to Stop Overproduction of Children,” published in 1934,. she decreed that “no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit … no permit shall be valid for [PAGE SPLIT] more than one child .114′ But Sanger couched this fascistic agenda in the argument that “liberated” women wouldn’t mind such measures because they don’t really want large families in the first place. In a trope that would be echoed by later feminists such as Betty Friedan, she argued that motherhood itself was a socially imposed constraint on the liberty of women. It was a form of what Marxists called false consciousness to want a large family.

Sanger believed—prophetically enough—that if women conceived of sex as first and foremost a pleasurable experience rather than a procreative act, they would embrace birth control as a necessary tool for their own personal gratification. She brilliantly used the language of liberation to convince women they weren’t going along with a collectivist scheme but were in fact “speaking truth to power,” as it were.” This was the identical trick the Nazis pulled off. They took a radical Nietzschean doctrine of individual will and made it into a trendy dogma of middle-class conformity. This trick remains the core of much faddish “individualism” among rebellious conformists on the American cultural left today. Nonetheless, Sanger’s analysis was surely correct, and led directly to the widespread feminist association of sex with political rebellion. Sanger in effect “bought off’ women (and grateful men) by offering tolerance for promiscuity in return for compliance with her eugenic schemes.

In 1939 Sanger created the previously mentioned “Negro Project,” which aimed to get blacks to adopt birth control. Through the Birth Control Federation, she hired black ministers (including the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr.), doctors, and other leaders to help pare down the supposedly surplus black population. The project’s racist intent is beyond doubt. “The mass of significant Negroes,” read the project’s report, “still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes … is [in] that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.” Sanger’s intent is shocking today, but she recognized its extreme radicalism even then. “We do not want word to go out,” she wrote to a colleague, “that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Grand Illusions – 115

virtually all of her Socialist friends, lovers, and comrades were committed Eugenicists as well—from the followers of Lenin in Revolutionary Socialism, like H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Julius Hammer,” to the… followers of Hitler in National Socialism, like Ernest Rudin, Leon Whitney, and Harry Laughlin.” But it wasn’t simply sentiment or politics that drew Margaret into the Eugenic fold. She was thoroughly convinced that the “inferior races” were in fact “human weeds” and a “menace to civilization.”

From its earliest days the proportion of minorities in a community was closely related to the location of Planned Parenthood’s birth control clinics.

More recently, when Planned Parenthood began to shift its focus from community-based clinics to school-based clinics, it again targeted inner-city minority neighborhoods.” Of the more than one hundred school-based clinics that have opened nationwide in the last decade, none have been at substantially all-White schools.” None have been at suburban middle-class schools. All have been at African-American, minority, or ethnic schools.”

Grand Illusions – 40

In one passage, she followed the Malthusian party-line advocating the abandonment of all forms of charity and compassion. She wrote:

Even if we accept organized charity at its own valuation, and grant it does the best it can, it is exposed to a more profound criticism. It reveals a fundamental and irremediable defect. It’s very success, it’s very efficiency, it’s very necessity to the social order are the most unanswerable indictment. Organized charity is the symptom of a malignant social disease. Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding, and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the failure of philanthropy, but rather at its success. These dangers are inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, dangers which have today produced their full harvest of human waste.”

Again, she wrote:

The most serious charge that can be brought against modern benevolence is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents, and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression. Philanthropy is a gesture characteristic of modern business lavishing upon the unfit the profits extorted from the community at large. Looked at impartially, this compensatory generosity is in its final effect probably more dangerous, more dysgenic, more blighting than the initial practice of profiteering.”

Grand Illusions – 41-42

Not surprisingly, Planned Parenthood officials have always tried to deflect any criticism of their founder’s B-movie worldview of weird science and ideological compulsion. Though they have managed all manner of intellectual gymnastics and historical revisionism in a feeble attempt to deny it, hide it, and belie it, Sanger was undeniably mesmerized by the fashionable elitism of Malthusian Eugenics.”

She was thoroughly convinced that the “inferior races” were in fact a “menace to civilization.” She really believed that “social regeneration” would only be possible as the “sinister forces of the hordes of irresponsibility and imbecility” were repulsed. She had come to regard organized charity to ethnic minorities and the poor as a “symptom of a malignant social disease” because it encouraged the prolificacy of those “defectives, delinquents, and dependents” she so obviously abhorred. She yearned for the end of the Christian “reign of benevolence” that the Eugenic Socialists promised, when the “choking human undergrowth” of “morons and imbeciles” would be “segregated” and ultimately “sterilized.” Her greatest aspiration was “to create a race of thoroughbreds” by encouraging “more children from the fit, and less from the unfit.” And the only way to achieve that dystopic goal, she realized, was through the harsh and coercive tyranny of Malthusian Eugenics.”

In other words, she was a true believer not simply someone who assimilated the Flash Gordon jargon of the times—as Planned Parenthood officials would have us believe. She was a committed elitist bent on undermining the familial bonds of the poor and disenfranchised.”

Thus, as she began to build the work of the American Birth Control League, and ultimately, of Planned Parenthood, Margaret relied heavily on the men, women, ideas, and resources of the Eugenics movement. Virtually all of the organization’s board members were Eugenicists. Financing for the early projects—from the opening of the first birth control clinics to the publishing of the revolutionary literature—came from Eugenicists. The speakers at the conferences, the authors of the propaganda and the providers of the services were almost without exception avid Eugenicists.

The Birth Control Review — Sanger’s magazine and the immediate predecessor to the Planned Parenthood Review regularly and openly published the racist articles of Malthusian Eugenicists. In 1920 — for instance, it published a favorable review of Lothrop Stoddard’s frightening book of Fascist diatribe, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy.” In 1923, the Review editorialized in favor of restricting immigration on a racial basis.” In 1932, it outlined Sanger’s own “Plan for Peace,” which called for coercive sterilization, mandatory segregation, and at rehabilitative concentration camps for all “dysgenic stocks.”” In 1933, the Review published a shocking article entitled “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need. 1171 It was written by Sanger’s close friend and advisor, Ernst Rudin, who was then serving as Hitler’s director of genetic sterilization and had earlier taken a prominent role in the establishment of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. Later that same year, it published an article by Leon Whitney entitled, “Selective Sterilization,” which adamantly praised and defended the Third Reich’s pre-holocaust “race purification” programs.”

The bottom line is that Sanger self-consciously organized the Birth Control League—and its progeny, Planned Parenthood—in part, to promote and enforce the scientifically elitist notions of racial purification and perfection. Thus, like the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi Party, and the Mensheviks, Sanger’s enterprise was from its inception implicitly and explicitly racist. And this racist orientation was all too evident in its various programs and initiatives: government control over family decisions, non-medicinal health-care experimentations, the rabid abortion crusade, and the coercive sterilization initiatives.

Grand Illusions – 81-82

Planned Parenthood is a paradigmatical illustration of this principle. Margaret Sanger’s character and vision are perfectly mirrored in the organization that she wrought. She intended it that way. And the leaders th…at have come after her have not attempted to have it another way. Dr. Alan Guttmacher, the man who immediately succeeded her as president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, once said, “We are merely walking down the path that Mrs. Sanger carved out for us.”‘ Faye Wattleton, president of the organization during the decade of the eighties, has claimed that she is “proud” to be “walking in the footsteps” of Margaret Sanger. And the president of the New York affiliate is Alexander Sanger, her grandson.

Liberal Fascism 270-271

Margaret Sanger, whose American Birth Control League became Planned Parenthood, was the founding mother of the birth control movement. She is today considered a liberal saint, a founder of modern feminism, and one of the leading lights of the progressive pantheon. Gloria Feldt of Planned Parenthood proclaims, “I stand by Margaret Sanger’s side,” leading “the organization that carries on Sanger’s legacy.” Planned Parenthood’s first black president, Faye Wattleton—Ms. magazine’s Woman of the Year in 1989—said that she was “proud” to be “walking in the footsteps of Margaret Sanger.” Planned Parenthood gives out annual Maggie Awards to individuals and organizations who advance Sanger’s cause. Recipients are a Who’s Who of liberal icons, from the novelist John Irving to the producers of NBC’s West Wing. What Sanger’s liberal admirers are eager to downplay is that she was a thoroughgoing racist who subscribed completely to the views of E. A. Ross and other “raceologists.” Indeed, she made many of them seem tame.

The racialist ideas that were developing independently in India and Europe fused in esoterica. In The Secret Doctrine, the Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy, a book originally published as two volumes in 1888, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky saw the “Aryans” as the fifth of her seven “Root Race.”

War Against the Weak, 127

…Sanger was an ardent, self-confessed eugenicist, and she would turn her… birth control organizations into a tool for eugenics, which advocated for mass sterilization of so-called defectives, mass incarceration of the unfit and draconian immigration restrictions. Like other staunch eugenicists, Sanger vigorously opposed charitable efforts to uplift the downtrodden and deprived, and argued extensively that it was better that the cold and hungry be left without help, so that the eugenically superior strains could multiply without competition from “the unfit.” She repeatedly referred to the lower classes and the unfit as “human waste” not worthy of assistance, and proudly quoted the extreme eugenic view that human “weeds” should be “exterminated.” Moreover, for both political and genuine ideological reasons, Sanger associated closely with some of America’s most fanatical eugenic racists. Both through her publication, Birth Control Review, and her public oratory, Sanger helped legitimize and widen the appeal of eugenic pseudoscience.

The End of Racism, 118

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, coined the slogan “More children from the fit, less from the unfit.” In language that many of her contemporary admirers would probably like to forget, she described blacks and Eastern European immigrants as “a menace to civilization” and “human weeds.” Concerned that American blacks might protest Planned Parenthood’s special “Negro Project” aimed at promoting sterilization, Sanger wrote to an associate, “We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”

For the Lazy one’s here, I will isolate a particularly poignant section:

Planned Parenthood is a paradigmatical illustration of this principle. Margaret Sanger’s character and vision are perfectly mirrored in the organization that she wrough…t. She intended it that way. And the leaders that have come after her have not attempted to have it another way. Dr. Alan Guttmacher, the man who immediately succeeded her as president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, once said, “We are merely walking down the path that Mrs. Sanger carved out for us.”‘ Faye Wattleton, president of the organization during the decade of the eighties, has claimed that she is “proud” to be “walking in the footsteps” of Margaret Sanger. And the president of the New York affiliate is Alexander Sanger, her grandson.

There were some reposnses, none were really on topic or were argued well in the face of the facts. I respond to some of these non-responses by keeping on track:

78% of their clinics are in minority communities…. Several years ago, when 17,000 aborted babies were found in a dumpster outside a pathology laboratory in Los, Angeles, California, some 12-15,000 were observed to be black….

You are right, today’s culture would not allow such Nazi propaganda to be written. But we (America) imported its Fabian socialist eugenic goals to Germany. How would you tell if the program is being fulfilled today? By leaders saying outrig…ht that they support the extermination of minorities — OR — by implicitly saying they support Sanger’s goals and by looking at the numbers? Again:

…In New York City in 2007, 87,527 abortions were performed, with 43,568–or 49.8 percent–of the aborted babies being black, according to the CDC. The number of white babies aborted in 2007 in New York City was 37,870–or 43.3 percent. 6,089, or 7 percent, were babies of other races, according to the report.

49.8 percent of abortions performed in NYC were black babies. According to the Census Bureau, there are 8,302,659 people in New York City, of whom 2,085,514–or 25 percent–are black. Thus, black babies in New York City were aborted at a rate that is twice the black share of the municipal population.

A report released in December by the New York Department of Health indicated that that black babies represented an even higher percentage among those aborted in New York City in 2009. That report said about 41 percent of pregnancies in the city ended in abortion in 2009 and 59.8 percent of those abortions were of black babies.

[….]

Planned Parenthood is a paradigmatical illustration of this principle. Margaret Sanger’s character and vision are perfectly mirrored in the organization that she wrough…t. She intended it that way. And the leaders that have come after her have not attempted to have it another way. Dr. Alan Guttmacher, the man who immediately succeeded her as president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, once said, “We are merely walking down the path that Mrs. Sanger carved out for us.”‘ Faye Wattleton, president of the organization during the decade of the eighties, has claimed that she is “proud” to be “walking in the footsteps” of Margaret Sanger. And the president of the New York affiliate is Alexander Sanger, her grandson.

Michael Yon gets as frank as possible in this detailed pushback to Rolling Stone’s article on allegations of systemic abuse in Afghanistan. Having served with the larger unit in question, Yon accuses RS of conflating legitimate action against the enemy with the isolated incidents of alleged murder in order to make the entire unit and chain of command look bad, and that it left out important context as well:

The online edition of the Rolling Stone story contains a section with a video called “Motorcycle Kill,” which includes our Soldiers gunning down Taliban who were speeding on a motorcycle toward our guys. These Soldiers were also with 5/2 SBCT, far away from the “Kill Team” later accused of the murders. Rolling Stone commits a literary “crime” by deceptively entwining this normal combat video with the Kill Team story. The Taliban on the motorcycle were killed during an intense operation in the Arghandab near Kandahar City. People who have been to the Arghandab realize the extreme danger there. The Soviets got beaten horribly in the Arghandab, despite throwing everything including the Soviet kitchen sink into the battle that lasted over a month. Others fared little better. To my knowledge, 5/2 and supporting units were the first ever to take Arghandab, and these two dead Taliban were part of that process.

The killing of the armed Taliban on the motorcycle was legal and within the rules of engagement. Law and ROE are related but separate matters. In any case, the killing was well within both the law and ROE. The Taliban on the back of the motorcycle raised his rifle to fire at our Soldiers but the rifle did not fire. I talked at length with several of the Soldiers who were there and they gave me the video. There was nothing to hide. I didn’t even know about the story until they told me. It can be good for Soldiers to shoot and share videos because it provides instant replay and lessons learned. When they gave me the video and further explained what happened, I found the combat so normal that I didn’t even bother publishing it, though I should have because that little shooting of the two Taliban was the least of the accomplishments of these Soldiers, and it rid the Arghandab of two Taliban.

Some people commented that our Soldiers used excessive force by firing too many bullets. Hogwash. And besides, they were trying to kill each other. Anyone who has seen much combat with our weak M-4 rifles realizes that one shot is generally not enough, and the Taliban were speeding at them on a motorbike, which very often are prepared as suicide bombs. If that motorcycle had been a bomb, as they often are, and got inside the group of Soldiers and exploded, they could all have been killed. Just yesterday, in Paktika, three suicide attackers came in, guns blazing, and detonated a huge truck bomb. Depending on which reports you read, about twenty workers were killed and about another fifty wounded.

I hadn’t heard the “too many bullets” argument, but it’s of a piece with the notion that the use of force in war should be measured and reciprocal, which is hogwash of another sort. When an enemy speeds at your position on a motorcycle while brandishing an automatic rifle in the context of war, you are not under any sort of obligation to only match the attack bullet for bullet. To do so would be to give up the advantages of both numbers and firepower. It’s a great way to get more American and NATO soldiers killed.

Retired University of South Florida Professor Darryl Paulson, an expert on the Klan, says Rogers was the head of the organization in Florida that was part of one of the largest and one of the most violent branches of the KKK, The United Klans of America.

As of yet, there’s been no comment or press release on Rogers’s candidacy from the Southern Poverty Law Center